To Die For

“I brought you a Diet Coke,” he said, sliding the can toward me. “You’ve probably had enough coffee.”

“Thank you,” I said, to underscore the difference between his manners and mine. I didn’t open the can, though. My stomach was already jittery from too much caffeine. Also, as a peace offering, the Diet Coke didn’t make the grade, especially since I was well aware he’d left the room more to give himself some breathing space before he snapped and tried to strangle me. The Diet Coke was a last-minute thought, to make it look as if he was being considerate when in fact it was his own skin he’d been protecting, because I’m sure it would be hell on his career if he strangled a witness. Not that I was much of a witness, but in this case I was all they had.

“Now get out of my chair.”

I blew my hair out of my eyes. “I’m not finished with my list. Let me have the pad back.”

“Blair. Get out of my chair.”

I wish I could say I behaved like an adult, but I was already way past the point where I could do that. I clamped my hands on the arms of the chair, glared at him, and said, “Make me.”

Damn, I wish I hadn’t said that.

A very short and humiliating struggle later, I was back in the chair where he’d originally put me, and he was in his chair, looking angry again.

“Damn it.” He scrubbed his hand over his whiskery jaw, where his five o’clock shadow had long ago become darker than that. “If you don’t behave- Do you know how close you came to being in my lap instead of that chair?”

Whoa. Where had that come from? I pulled back in alarm. “What?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. And I don’t buy your earlier act, either. You remember me, all right. I’ve had you naked.”

“You have not!” I said, shocked. Did he have me confused with someone else? I was pretty sure I’d have remembered that. Yes, clothing had been shed, but I definitely had not been naked.

He gave a grim smile. “Honey, trust me: when all you have on is a skimpy little skirt pulled up around your waist, that’s naked.”

I trembled a little, because this was indeed familiar. I remembered the occasion well. It was the second date. He’d been on the couch; I’d been astride him, his fingers had been inside me, and I’d been an inch away from saying to hell with the concept of birth control, and taking my chances.

I blushed, not in embarrassment, but because the office was becoming uncomfortably warm. The thermostat for the air-conditioning in the building needed to be bumped down just a notch. Just because I felt all squirmy inside, however, didn’t mean I was giving up the fight. “Naked means totally without clothes, so therefore by your own description I definitely wasn’t naked.”

“So you do remember,” he said with satisfaction. “And don’t split hairs. You were as good as naked.”

“There’s still a difference,” I insisted stubbornly. “And, yeah, I remember that we made out. So what?”

“You mean you get naked with a man so often it doesn’t mean anything anymore?” he asked, his eyes narrowing.

I was tired of pretending. He wasn’t buying it, anyway. I looked him in the eye and said, “Evidently it didn’t mean anything that time, either.”

He grimaced. “Ouch. I know I owe you an explanation. I’m sorry-”

“Save your breath. The time for explanations passed a long time ago.”

“Did it?”

“I moved on. Haven’t you?”

“I thought I had,” he said, scowling. “But when I got the call that there’d been a murder at Great Bods and the victim was a blond female, I-” He broke off, then said, “Shit.”

I blinked at him, honestly surprised. Come to think of it, his first words to me had been Are you all right? And he’d gone out in the rain to the crime scene to see Nicole’s body before coming inside. Surely by then her name had been broadcast, but maybe not, until her family could be notified. I had no idea who or where her family was, but there was probably a next- of-kin listed in her paperwork at Great Bods, which Detective MacInnes had taken.

Poor Nicole. She’d been a psycho-bitch copycat, but it bothered me that her body had been lying out in the rain for such a long time while the cops worked the crime scene. I knew crime scene investigations took a while, and the rain had hindered the cops as well, but still, she’d lain there for a good three hours before they let her be moved.

He snapped his fingers in my face. “You keep wandering off.”

Man, I wanted to bite those fingers. I hate it when people do things like that, when a little wave will suffice to get my attention. “Well, excuse me. I’m exhausted and I witnessed a murder tonight, but it’s terribly rude of me not to stay focused on personal matters. You were saying?”

He studied me for a moment, then shook his head. “Never mind. You are exhausted, and I have a murder investigation to oversee. I wish you weren’t involved in it, but you are, so you’ll be seeing more of me whether you want to or not. Just stop pushing, will you? Let me do my job. I admit it, I can’t concentrate when you’re in my face making me crazy.”

“I don’t make you crazy,” I snapped, incensed. “You were evidently crazy before I ever met you. May I go home now?”

He rubbed his eyes and visibly reined in his temper. “In a few minutes. I’ll take you home.”

“Someone can give me a ride back to Great Bods. I need my car.”

“I said I’ll take you home.”

“And I said I need my car.”

“I’ll have it brought to you tomorrow. I don’t want you messing around the crime scene.”

“Fine. I’ll take a cab home. No need to put yourself out.” I stood and grabbed my bag, ready to head out the door. I’d stand on the sidewalk, even though it was still pouring down rain, while I waited for the cab.

“Blair. Sit down.”

That was the bad thing about him being a cop. I didn’t know exactly where his official authority ended and the personal stuff began. I didn’t know exactly what legal ground I was standing on. I was pretty sure I could walk out and there wouldn’t be a thing he could do about it-legally-but there was always the tiny possibility I was wrong, and the big possibility that he’d force me to stay whether it was legal or not, and I didn’t want to have another tussle with him. Tussling was bad for my self-control.

I sat down, and contented myself with glaring mulishly. I had a niggling suspicion he intended to get back on a personal footing with me, and I didn’t want to go down that road again. With that in mind, the less contact I had with him, the better.

I have a rule: Walk out, crawl back. If a man does the first, then he has to do the second to get back on good terms with me. I can handle an argument, because at least then you’re communicating, but to just walk out and not give me a chance to work things out-that’s a big no-no.

I know that sounds as if I need to get over myself, but the truth is-and I know I blew it off as the divorce being the best thing for both of us-it hurt like hell when I caught Jason kissing my sister Jenni. Not just because Jenni had betrayed me, but because I had truly loved Jason. Our first couple of years together had been very happy. At least, I’d been happy, and I think he was, too. We did grow apart and I fell out of love with him, but that didn’t mean I had given up on our marriage. I was willing to work on it, to try to get close to him again. When I saw him kissing Jenni, it was like a punch in the stomach, and I realized he must have been cheating on me for some time. Not with Jenni; I pretty much thought that was the first time he’d touched her. But he wasn’t in love with her, so that meant he’d done it just because she was pretty and available, and that meant he’d very likely done it with other women, too.

He hadn’t even tried to make our marriage work. He’d dumped me emotionally a long time